Banana Pi Release New Raspberry Pi Pico Alternative
fliptop writes:
An overview, including specs, is available at tom's HARDWARE:
The Raspberry Pi Pico's "Pi Silicon" RP2040 SoC was the plentiful source of microcontroller brains during a long period of supply chain woes. It was natural for official partners (Adafruit, SparkFun, Arduino and Pimoroni) to release their own spins on the $4 microcontroller, and others including Banana Pi followed suit. For its latest model, the Banana Pi BPI-Pico-RP2040 we see the same 40 pin form factor but there are a few differences between the official Pico and Banana Pi's.
[...] Let's start with the price. Coming in at a MSRP of $6.58 (currently discounted to $5.26) the board is $2 more than an official Raspberry Pi Pico. For the additional dollars we get an onboard WS2812B "NeoPixel" RGB LED connected to GPIO3 (PDF) and a 4 pin JST-PH socket. This socket is more commonly referred to as Stemma QT, Qwiic or QW/ST and in reality it breaks out the I2C interface (I2C0 on pins GP8 and 9 to be specific) for use with compatible devices.
[...] More information on the Banana Pi BPI-Pico-RP2040 can be found via the official wiki. There are schematics and mechanical drawings for those of us eager to add the board to their next project. The board is on sale via Aliexpress.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.